Lawrence Roberts
Just as time-shared computer systems have permitted groups of hundreds of individual users to share hardware and software resources with one another, networks connecting dozens of such systems will permit resource sharing between thousands of users.
- Larry Roberts, ARPA Program Plan 723, 3 June 1968.
Larry Roberts is sometimes called the "father of the ARPANET." He earned this nickname by directing the team of engineers that created the ARPANET, which was the foundation of our modern High Speed Internet. Roberts was also the principal architect of the ARAPNET.
Lawrence (Larry) Roberts, born in 1937, grew up in Westport, Connecticut as the son of Elliott and Elizabeth Roberts, who both had attained their doctorates in chemistry. During his youth, he built a Tesla coil, put together a television, and configured a telephone network assembled from transistors for his parent's Girl Scout camp.
Roberts attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned his bachelor's degree (1959), master's degree (1960), and Ph.D. (1963), all in electrical engineering.
After MIT, he then joined the Lincoln Laboratory, where he conducted research into computer networks. In a crucial meeting in November, 1964, Roberts met with J.C.R. Licklider, who inspired Roberts with his ambition to construct a wide area communications network. In February, 1965, the director of the IPTO, Ivan Sutherland, awarded a contract to Roberts to develop a computer network, and, in July, to Thomas Marill (who had likewise been urged on by Licklider) to program the network. In October, 1965, the Lincoln Labs TX-2/ANS/Q-32 computer spoke to Marill's SDC's Q32 computer in one of the worlds first digital network communications. In October, 1966, Roberts and Marill wrote a paper titled Toward a Cooperative Network of Time-Shared Computers at the Fall AFIPS Conference, documenting their networking experiments.
Also in 1966, DARPA head Charlie Hertzfeld pledged IPTO Director Bob Taylor a million dollars to construct a distributed communications network if he could get it structured. Taylor was greatly impressed by Lawrence Roberts work, and asked him to come to IPTO to lead the campaign. Roberts refused, but eventually joined as ARPA IPTO Chief Scientist in December 1966 when Taylor got Hertzfeld to twist the arm of the director of Lincoln Labs to put pressure on Roberts. Roberts instantly started working on the system design for a wide area digital communications network that would come to be known as the ARPANET.
In April, 1967, Roberts scheduled an "ARPANET Design Session" at the IPTO Principal Investigator meeting in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The standards for identification and authentication of users, transmission of characters, and error checking and retransmission processes were drafted at this meeting, and it was at this gathering that Wesley Clark proposed using a separate minicomputer called the Interface Message Processor to interface to the network.
Roberts presented a paper called Multiple Computer Networks and Intercomputer Communication that summarized the ARPANET design at the ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles at Gatlinburg, Tennessee, in October 1967. He then composed a program plan known as "Resource Sharing Computer Networks" to form a working implementation of the network. The project justified itself, in part, by reasoning that various departments would be able to log into other computers and use their programs remotely, thereby saving the costs of purchasing or building programs themselves, and greatly enlarging the capacities available to each site on the network. He presented the report to Taylor on June 3, 1968, who approved it immediately and the process was begun. Roberts also employed the developer of TCP/IP, Robert Kahn, who had worked on the Interface Message Processor at BBN.
Roberts became Director of the IPTO when Taylor departed in September, 1969. He left the IPTO in October, 1973, to become CEO of Telenet, the first packet switching network carrier, which later standardized on the X.25 networking system originally employed on the EUnet. He later on left Telenet when it was sold to GTE in 1979 and became the data division of Sprint. He was CEO of NetExpress, an ATM equipment company, from 1983 to 1993. Roberts was president of ATM Systems from 1993 to 1998. He was chairman and CTO of Caspian Networks, but left in early 2004 and Caspian discontinued operations in late 2006.
Roberts is the founder and current chairman of Anagran Inc. Anagran continues work in the same sphere as Caspian: IP flow management with improved QoS for the Internet. Among other awards and accolades, he has received the Secretary of Defense Meritorious Service Medal and today he lives in Silicon Valley.